I still consider myself a feminist.

To me, a feminist belongs in the same category as a humanist or an advocate for human rights. I don't see why someone who's a feminist should be thought of differently.

It takes as much discipline to be a mother and a wife as it does to do anything else.

I wouldn't characterize my work, however, as directly political.

You have to defend your honor. And your family.

Some girls are taught to be sexy.

In the end, my pursuit of the elusive New York State driver's license became about much more than a divorced woman's learning to drive for the first time.

I had some fears as a kid, but I was also relatively fearless. Maybe that's a result of living half the time in reality and the other half in fantasy.

I loved the atmosphere of the dance studios - the wooden floors, the big mirrors, everyone dressed in pink or black tights, the musicians accompanying us - and the feeling of ritual the classes had.

Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that.

Don't make a threat and then not do it.

How weird it was to drive streets I knew so well. What a different perspective.

When I was pregnant, I felt filled with life, and I felt really happy. I ate well, and I slept well. I felt much more useful than I'd ever felt before.

My intellect has always been more responsible than my emotions for how I respond to the world.

So you eat, you sleep, and then this wonderful child comes out, but you don't feel like you have any control over that process, over her, over her character and who she is.

There are no rules in fights with girls. Just hurting.

I think people are sexy when they have a sense of humor, when they are smart, when they have some sense of style, when they are kind, when they express their own opinions, when they are creative, when they have character.

I don't think gender is aesthetically defining for me.

Of course, sometimes when you write personally, you are also writing about society, obliquely reflecting topical issues, but not in a way that people would expect you to or in the way that someone trying to make a point would.

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.

If you have to fight a crowd of boys, it's best to go for the biggest one. That way you won't have to fight them all. The others will see that you mean business and you will win their respect.

Girls are crazy and mean. They don't fight fair.

I still consider myself a feminist.

My mother wanted me to understand that as a woman I could do pretty much whatever I wanted to, that I didn't have to use sex or sexuality to define myself.

Writing in other voices is almost Japanese in the sense that there's a certain formality there which allows me to sidestep the embarrassment of directly expressing to complete strangers the most intimate details of my life.

A lot of my writing is not terribly civilized.

Writing is always personal in some way but not always in a direct way.

I like big casts. The experience of working together, that human contact - those are my roots, professionally.

I am desperate to do a comedy now.

When I am free to train and free to move, I feel like a gorilla in the jungle. Then, when there are a bunch of media obligations, I feel like I have been captured and am being kept on display.

Iraq is the central battleground in the war on terror. The terrorists certainly know what is at stake, which is why they are pulling out all the stops to derail our efforts there. They know that a free and democratic Iraq is a serious blow to their interests.

We sell tea in Starbucks, but I think the experience is very different. I think coffee is something that is quick - it's transactional. I think tea is more Zen-like. It requires a different environment.

Morning is the dream renewed, the heart refreshed, earth's forgiveness painted in the colors of the dawn.

Don't ignore the love you do have in your life by focusing on the love you don't.

Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.

I wanted to be a director and producer and writer, but in the early '40's the union wouldn't let you get through the gates. You couldn't get on a crew, or even learn to direct.

Time heals many wounds but this loss becomes the defining sadness of your life.

We may give without loving, but we cannot love without giving.

There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.

We have to forget the past. History is something that even today we are paying the consequences and the future is integration. We all as a people as citizens as the leadership of both countries should be looking in that direction.

If football taught me anything about business, it is that you win the game one play at a time.

Don't know about a cabaret act right now, would actually prefer a role in a broadway musical.

Ultimately, I'd love to be able to work in film.

I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader.

Being a parent has taught me a lot of things already, you know, though it's only been a year and half, and has made me address parts of myself that I would otherwise live in comfortable denial of, or you know and - you know, for instance, my self-loathing.

If you took ISIS' oil, that would not stop them. It's not their only source of revenue. It would be a setback, but it would not stop them.

I do a lot of swimming, both in the ocean and in the pool.

'Ageism,' or whatever you want to call it, is a very English phenomenon. You don't get it too much in many other cultures. And no one says it about authors or poets or filmmakers. 'Oh, they're too old to make films or write books.'